We Rescued 6,000 Student Records From Data Hostage—Here's What We Learned

Imagine needing four months and a team of data entry operators just to access your own institutional records.

That's the reality we encountered when a four-branch Mumbai school chain with over 6,000 students decided to migrate to Unity. They weren't leaving because their existing platform was broken—they were leaving because it had become a financial trap. But when they tried to extract their data, they discovered something alarming: they didn't actually own a single byte of their own information.

This isn't an isolated incident. It's a systemic problem in educational technology that's quietly bleeding institutions dry while holding their institutional legacy hostage. And if you're running a school or university on a traditional SaaS platform, there's a good chance you're next.

The breaking point for this school chain wasn't a catastrophic system failure. It was something almost absurdly small: they wanted to add a download button to student profiles.

The quote from their vendor? ₹5 lakhs.

For a button.

This wasn't about technical complexity—it was about control. The vendor knew the institution was locked in, and they could name their price. But the real shock came when the school opened a new branch and added 1,500 students. Their annual recurring cost immediately jumped by ₹15 lakhs (at ₹1,000 per student per year), despite receiving zero additional features or value.

This is the SaaS trap in education: your costs scale linearly with growth, but your value doesn't. As your institution succeeds, you're financially penalized for that success.

When the school chain committed to migration, we faced an unexpected challenge: actually getting their data out.

Technically, the vendor "provided access." But bulk export? Disabled. API access? Restricted. The only option was to manually download documents—one at a time. With hundreds of documents per student and over 6,000 students, we were looking at 3-4 months of manual data entry work, with inevitable human errors that could corrupt years of academic records.

We had to develop a specialized solution to systematically extract and organize their institutional data. What would have taken months manually, we completed in a fraction of the time—at one-tenth the cost.

But here's the question that should trouble every educational administrator: Why should extracting your own data be this difficult in the first place?

We're seeing a troubling pattern emerge across the EdTech landscape. Many VC-backed SaaS platforms are built for short-term exits, not long-term institutional partnerships. They live for 5-7 years before acquisition or shutdown. Meanwhile, educational institutions operate on timescales of decades—even centuries.

The mismatch is structural. A rigid SaaS platform can't adapt quickly to changing institutional needs. And institutions can't scale without breaking the bank under per-student pricing models.

Most educators aren't technical enough to scrutinize data ownership clauses in their contracts. By the time they face the problem—when they want to migrate, or when their vendor dramatically raises prices, or when the platform shuts down—it's often too late. Their institutional memory is trapped behind a login screen they don't control.

There's also an emerging regulatory dimension. As data sovereignty and privacy regulations tighten globally (think GDPR in Europe, similar movements in India), institutions that don't control their data infrastructure face serious compliance risks.

Unity exists because one of our co-founders, Nikhil Karkare of Walnut Schools, lived this nightmare firsthand.

Nikhil spent 8 years building a custom ERP from the ground up on legacy systems. Maintenance was a constant headache. When he discovered Frappe—an open-source, low-code platform with a massive global community—the path forward became clear. What had taken 8 years to build, we reconstructed in 2 years with significantly more features and flexibility.

That's the foundation Unity is built on: Frappe and ERPNext, battle-tested open-source frameworks used by thousands of organizations worldwide.

Here's what this means for your institution in practice:

✅ You receive the full source code – No black boxes, no mysteries
✅ You host your data on your infrastructure – We create an account for you on a cloud platform and add our DevOps team to maintain it. You own the hosting account. We maintain it for you if you choose.
✅ You can export everything, anytime – No permission needed, no specialized tools required
✅ One-time cost model – Based on modules and customizations you need, plus minimal AMC for maintenance
✅ True scalability – Adding 1,500 students doesn't add ₹15 lakhs to your annual bill

When a Unity customer needs custom analytics, or wants to integrate with research systems, or needs to comply with new data regulations—they can. Because they own the code and the data.

Your institution's data is your institutional legacy. Student records, academic histories, operational insights spanning years or decades—this isn't just information. It's your organizational memory.

When a vendor controls that data and makes it difficult or expensive to leave, you need to ask yourself one critical question: Why?

If your current platform were truly confident in its value, it wouldn't need to hold your data hostage to keep you as a customer.

Educational institutions deserve better. They deserve partners, not captors.

Want to see how Unity's source-available model works in practice?
Book a demo at unityedu.ai or reply to this email with your questions.

Have you faced vendor lock-in or data ownership challenges at your institution? I'd genuinely love to hear your story—reply and let me know what you've experienced.

Your insights help us build better solutions for the entire education community.